Hotties, Hunks, Beat Up, Celebrities: The Allure of the Mug Shot

If you work in a prison, as I did a few years ago, there’s a decent chance you’ll meet a guy who’ll tell you to be wary of anyone caught smiling in his mug shot. The wisdom of this counsel will become plainly evident when you discover that the man who offered it, and who was rather insistent about it, is himself smiling in his own mug shot. Lurking behind this prisoner’s complicated smile, it seems, is an awareness that this image of his face will be widely seen and interpreted. He knows very well that it will be circulated in public, and that the primary purpose of the mug shot—to identify him to those in power—is only a portion of its evolving significance. When you sit for a mug shot today, your criminal likeness is being entered into a cultural consciousness, not just a legal one—and you know, or ought to know, that it’ll probably show up that very same day on a Web site that’s also pushing Toyotas.

Web sites devoted to collecting mug shots are popping up everywhere. At first glance, the online culture of mug-shot voyeurism would seem to be the logical extension of our eternal quest for celebrity cellulite. As it turns out, though, celebrity Schadenfreudians are minor players on the mug-shot scene. The most popular sites peddle a more homely stock: the disgraced images of our until recently anonymous neighbors. This is mostly out of editorial necessity. Celebrity mug shots are both not plentiful enough and much too plentiful; they bubble up infrequently and, when they do, go viral immediately. That’s not a good combination if you’re trying to bring traffic to your Web site. Local mug shots, on the other hand, are a perfect online product. They are gossipy, visually stimulating, and free—and the supply is bottomless, renewing itself by the hour for as long as humans continue to sin. Mug-shots sites harvest their content directly from local authorities that release booking photos and arrest information as a matter of public record.

The most ambitious mug-shot blogs present themselves as hybrids of newspaper and fetish sites, with photos organized under section titles that range from “Local News” and “Sports” to “Transgender” and “Beat-Up.” (Some news sites have themselves appropriated the form. The CBS-affiliated, WTSP Channel 10 news, “Tampa Bay’s news leader,” runs a slide show called “Notorious Women” on its Web site, which features dozens of mug shots of attractive women. The entertainment potential of mug shots has crept back to the source: a sheriff’s department in Arizona invites users to its Web site to vote on the “mug shot of the day.”) These sites are full of pathos and picturesque weirdness: little old ladies, suspects whose uncooperative heads are propped up by anonymous gloved hands, characters whose masklike expressiveness seems more appropriate to commedia dell’arte, people done up in elaborate Halloween costumes of animals or devils (or, fatefully, of prison inmates), a mild-mannered looking man with a “FUCK YOU” tattoo covering his entire forehead.

Mug-shot sites brand themselves as a public service, and offer the requisite disclaimers that everyone pictured on them is innocent until proven guilty. But, of course, mug shots are the very image of guilt, and seem almost proof of it, which is why some states caution judges and prosecutors against submitting them to juries. And it’s for this precise reason—instant lurid appeal—that mug-shot blogs can be profitable. Some, like arrests.org and mugshots.com, run ads from major brands: Southwest Airlines, Zipcar, Adobe, Lysol, Nokia. Mugshots.com partners with ten separate vendors with names like mugshotbusters.com that provide a service for people desperate to have their mug shot removed from the site. This semi-extortion scheme is apparently legal.

In case there’s any doubt about the relationship between these sites and online social networks, mug-shot profiles are furnished with a Twitter button. Users can click directly through a particular mug shot to find the person on Facebook. This gets at these sites’ unspoken service as a cultural corrective to the endless self-presentation that happens on social-network sites: here we are allowed to see, or to imagine, what our friends and neighbors look like when they aren’t reclining on the beach or looking good at parties. Mug shots are the gargoyles crouching at the ledges of the cathedral of Facebook.

The earliest mug shots in the United States, from the eighteen-forties, were intended for the eyes of the police. But those photo collections swelled quickly and soon became unwieldy. It wasn’t long before the “rogues galleries,” as these leather-bound mug-shot photo albums were called, grew too large for police departments, much less for any one officer, to commit to memory. The only way to keep pace with the huge influx of information was to bring more brainpower to the task. Mug shots were published widely, and the job of seeing and remembering criminals’ faces was put to the public. The collective gaze is a formidable face-recognition technology. From almost the beginning, the creation of a photographic record of society’s criminals was a kind of crowd-sourced project. Implicit in the use of police photos, in other words, is the need for mass publication and a demand that each citizen look closely and acquaint himself with the faces of the notorious.

But what actually happens in this encounter has only partly to do with the practical task of police work. A mug shot doesn’t simply provide information, it lures us into a drama in which we are given an intimate, Leviathan’s-eye view of the state asserting dominance over an individual. In the old days, this spectacle took place live, on the scaffold of the pillory. Today, it happens in the creation and online circulation of the mug shot. In the faces of these photographic subjects we behold an alarming look of knowledge without consent, and the formal elements associated with this type of portrait—the rigid, head-on stare, the non-professional lighting and institutional accouterment—are charged with the candid photo’s shock of spontaneous revelation.

We’ve seen a version of the mug-shot drama many times before, almost daily in our newspapers. But it is precisely our fluency with it that makes us sensitive to departures in form, and compels us to seek out, promiscuously, every variation on the theme: A tear running down the cheek of a young woman, suggestive intrusions from the world outside of the frame, poses of miraculously unruffled prettiness, the smile in all its varieties. In these images, the power dynamic latent in all photography—the tense encounter between captor and captive, camera and subject—is played out openly. Here the bondage fantasy is a bit more than a fantasy, and it comes in all shades. When the massive and ever-growing collection of mug shots is given over to the hands of the public, people will reorganize the information according to the categories of their desires.

What links mug-shot blogging to its police origins is exactly this impulse to organize faces into categories. Police photos have always been used as a catalogue of physical details, a database that could be used to identify, then classify, a person as a criminal. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, these physical details themselves were regarded as literal reflections of criminality. To some criminologists, the shapes of a person’s head and face formed the basis of classification. This view was based on physiognomy, a popular theory that “all human beings carry charts of their mentality and character at their mast-heads, legible, even in detail, by all who know how read them,” as one contemporary practitioner put it. The physiognomic approach to understanding behavior and character was common in this period among social scientists, novelists, and the general population. Almost from the moment that photographic technology emerged, it was put to the service of another new field, criminology. Criminal physiognomists used photographs, together with elaborate statistical analyses of bodily proportions of every kind—convexity of the jaw, forehead and lip size, for example—in order to isolate and catalogue anatomical signs of criminality.

There’s a whiff of nineteenth-century criminal physiognomy in today’s mug-shot blogs. Galleries of photos organized by specific physical type, rows of bearded homeless men in arrests.org’s “Wino” category, or many of the other the categories on that site—“Beat Up,” “Grandmas”, “Grandpas,” “Grills,” “Hair,” “Hotties,” “Hunks,” “Scary,” “Tatted Up,” “Transgender,” “WTF”—bear a telling resemblance to physiognomical studies in which images of prisoners were damningly grouped together by forehead shape, nose size, or jaw proportion. Online collections of the criminal face have similarly translated a giant tangle of information into legible physical categories. Like those old studies, the resulting rows of photos don’t merely allow an observer to read the faces for meaning, they make it difficult to not read them this way.

The resemblance isn’t just in the method but also in the objective of classification. Like the physiognomy studies of the past, mug-shot blogs aren’t interested in individual images but in generalization, in sorting out the entire corpus into a taxonomy. Taken together, the little pictures add up to a big picture. In the nineteenth century, the goal was typically to prove the existence of a biologically determined criminal class, a “criminal race” that stood quite apart from those who were writing and reading the physiognomy studies. The taxonomy of mug-shot blogs has a slightly different aim—to maximize consumer options by personalizing the site to the tastes of users and advertisers, not to create scientific classification. Still, the result is similar: the clear delineation of two classes, those who sort and consume the data, and those who are the data.

This isn’t to say that mug-shotists aren’t ambivalent. Guilty pleasure is built into the form. When one blogger recently compiled her list of the thirty hottest mug shots of men, which she’d drawn from the mug-shot blog hotandbusted, she felt compelled to add “yikes” next to No. 14’s charge, domestic violence. At the end of her blog post, she explained, “I get that a lot of these guys ‘aren’t hot’ because they are also criminals (specifically the DUIers and the Domestic Violencers).” In the comments section on the post, her readers pointed out another problem: neither the blogger nor her source included mug shots of black men. This was a particularly egregious omission, said one commenter, given their disproportionately high rate among the mug shot population.

It’s hard to know how to untangle the positions in that particular debate. But here’s what we do know: the two most popular kinds of images on mug shot sites tend to polarize between the monstrous and the seductive. This isn’t a reflection on how mug shots look but rather on how people are looking at them. If, as John Updike wrote, the camera’s unblinking eye “invites, likes a psychoanalyst’s silence, self-exposure,” the troubled gaze returned from our prisoners has a similar effect on us. The more we look at, organize, and annotate their photos, the sharper the exposure of ourselves.

Image courtesy of SSPL/Getty Images.

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